A Promise Made With Someone Else’s House

In 1885, an Austrian writer named Nathan Birnbaum needed a word.

He wanted a name for an idea that was floating around Jewish communities in Europe: the idea that Jews should stop begging Europe to accept them and instead go build a country of their own. He took the name Zion, an ancient word for Jerusalem, and made a word out of it.

Zionism.

That’s where the name comes from. A writer inventing a label in Austria, thousands of kilometres from Palestine.

Not every Jew liked the idea. Plenty thought it was a fantasy. Plenty of religious Jews thought it was actually forbidden, that you don’t force God’s timetable. Plenty of others said, we are German, we are French, we are Polish, this is our home and we’re not leaving. The argument was loud and it went on for years.

Then a journalist wrote a book, and the argument changed.

The man with the plan

Theodor Herzl was an Austro-Hungarian journalist. Smart, stubborn, and very good at getting attention. He had watched the Dreyfus trial in Paris, and he had watched the crowds shouting for Jewish blood in the streets of a supposedly modern country, and he came away with one conclusion.

Europe will never stop. Ever. So stop asking.

In 1896 he published a small book called The Jewish State. It was not poetry. It read like a business plan. It talked about which company would move the people, how the land would be bought, what the flag might look like. Herzl genuinely believed that within fifty years there would be a Jewish state, and he wrote the steps down like a man planning a railway.

He was almost exactly right about the fifty years.

In 1897 he called the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. About two hundred delegates came. They sat in a concert hall, they wore formal coats, and they voted on a programme: a home for the Jewish people in Palestine, secured by public law.

He did not do it alone. The three men who turned an argument into a movement were all in that hall together. Herzl, who wrote the plan. Nathan Birnbaum, who had given the thing its name twelve years earlier. And Max Nordau, a doctor and writer already famous across Europe, who became its great public voice.

Afterwards Herzl wrote in his diary that at Basel he had founded the Jewish state, and that in five years or fifty, everyone would see it.

Here is what almost nobody in that hall discussed. The people who were already living in Palestine.

“The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man”

Some of them did notice, though.

Max Nordau, one of Herzl’s closest partners, sent two rabbis from Vienna to Palestine to have a proper look at the place. Go and see what we are working with, he told them.

They went. They came back. And the message they sent is one of the most famous sentences in this entire history.

The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.

They meant: the land is wonderful. It is also full. There are people there. Hundreds of thousands of them, with houses and fields and grandparents in the ground.

That warning arrived early. It was heard. And it was set aside.

Instead a slogan took hold in Europe, and it was repeated so many times that people stopped checking it: a land without a people for a people without a land.

Half of that sentence was true. The Jewish people of Europe really were a people in terrible danger. The other half was simply false, and everyone who went to Palestine and came back knew it was false.

Buying the ground

Ideas need money. This one got some.

Baron Edmond de Rothschild was a French aristocrat from a spectacularly rich banking family, and starting in the 1880s he began pouring his own fortune into Jewish farming settlements in Palestine. He spent more than fourteen million French francs. He backed about thirty settlements. One of the first was Rishon LeZion, founded in 1882.

He is buried there now. His remains were brought over from France in 1954 and laid in a mausoleum in landscaped gardens at Ramat HaNadiv, in the hills above Zikhron Ya’akov, one of the settlements his money built. Israeli schoolchildren are still taken there on school trips to learn about the men who paid for the beginning.

It is a quiet spot with a long view. What you are looking out over is ground that changed hands while the families farming it were finding out from strangers holding documents.

Then in 1901 the movement built itself a machine: the Jewish National Fund. Its job was to buy land in Palestine, and the rule attached to that land was the important part. Once the Fund owned a piece of ground, it belonged to the Jewish people permanently. It could not be sold on. And it could not be worked by Arabs.

Think about what that rule does over fifty years. Every field that changes hands is a field that leaves Arab hands and never comes back.

In 1907 a chemist named Chaim Weizmann visited Palestine for the first time. Weizmann was calm, charming, and relentless, and he would become the most effective Zionist diplomat alive. He set up a company in Jaffa to develop land. Within a few years the Jewish National Fund had bought around 10,000 dunams of farmland in the north, near Marj Ibn Amir.

And this is where a quiet cruelty starts.

Most Palestinian farmers did not own their fields on paper. They worked land that belonged to big landlords, often absentee landlords living in Beirut or Damascus who had never seen the place. When those landlords sold, the farmers found out from a stranger standing in their field holding a document.

You have lived here your whole life. Your father is buried over there. And you have thirty days.

Thousands of families were pushed off land this way, decades before any war. That is how the Nakba starts. Not with soldiers. With paperwork.

In 1908 the settlers formed an armed guard called Hashomer, “the Watchman,” to protect the settlements. The first Jewish militia in Palestine. Small. Nothing much yet.

Remember it anyway.

The man who saw it coming

Palestinians were not blind.

Najib Nassar was a Palestinian Christian pharmacist in Haifa who started a newspaper called Al-Carmel in 1908. He read the Zionist congress reports. He read them properly, in translation, while most of his neighbours were worrying about the harvest. And he began printing warnings.

This is not immigration, he wrote. This is a movement with a plan to take the country. He described what was coming as a dagger aimed at the heart of the Arabs.

People called him dramatic.

He was about forty years early, and completely correct.

The canal, and why Britain cared

In 1869 a ditch opened in Egypt and changed the value of everything near it.

The Suez Canal cut the sea journey from Britain to India from months down to weeks. The whole British Empire ran on that route. Troops, cotton, tea, mail, orders, all of it. Within fifteen years Britain had occupied Egypt outright, mostly to make sure nobody else could ever put a hand on the canal.

Now find Palestine on a map. It sits directly above the canal’s eastern approach. Whoever holds that strip is in a position either to threaten Suez or to shield it.

So British planners began spelling out what they wanted along that coast. A friendly population. European in outlook, dependent on Britain, and permanently unable to merge with its neighbours. Not quite a colony. A wedge.

There is a document that Arab historians cite constantly for this, and you should hear about it, and you should hear the catch too.

It is called the Campbell-Bannerman Report of 1907, after the British Prime Minister of the day. As it is usually quoted, a committee of European powers warned that the Arab world was dangerous because it might one day unite, and recommended planting a foreign body on the land bridge between Arab Asia and Arab Africa, a state hostile to its neighbours and friendly to Europe, so the two halves could never join up.

Here is the catch. No original of that report has ever been produced from the British archives. A number of historians think the version that circulates is not a genuine document. It is quoted everywhere in the Arab world and almost nowhere in British scholarship, and this series is not going to pretend a contested source is a settled one.

What is not contested is the thinking behind it. You do not need a secret report to show that Britain wanted a friendly wedge sitting above the Suez Canal, because British officials wrote that idea down over and over, in memos that definitely exist, signed with their own names. Palmerston in 1840. Herbert Samuel in 1915. It was never really a secret. It was policy.

A world war, and three promises

Then in 1914 the world caught fire.

The First World War pulled the Ottoman Empire in on Germany’s side, which meant that Britain and France were now at war with the empire that ran Palestine. And that meant something enormous: when the war ended, the map of the Middle East was going to be redrawn, and whoever won got to hold the pen.

Britain then made three separate promises about the same region. To three different groups. All within about two years.

Promise one. Between July 1915 and March 1916, Britain’s High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, exchanged ten letters with Sharif Hussein of Mecca. Britain wanted an Arab uprising behind Ottoman lines. Hussein wanted a guarantee of Arab independence across the region afterwards, and he spelled out the territory he meant.

McMahon agreed. Mostly. And then he slid in a clause that people have been arguing about for a hundred years.

He excluded, he wrote, the districts lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, on the grounds that these were not purely Arab.

Go and find those four cities. They run in a line up the inland side of Syria. What lies west of them is the Lebanese coast. Palestine lies a long way south of all four of them, and west of none of them.

Britain later insisted this sentence had excluded Palestine all along. The Arabs said that was nonsense, and pointed out that if Britain had meant to keep Palestine out of the deal, Britain could have written the word Palestine, which McMahon never did anywhere in ten letters.

The Arabic word McMahon used for “districts” was wilayah, which can mean an official Ottoman province or can just mean a general area, and the entire dispute hangs on which one he intended.

A promise that important was written in language that slippery. That was not carelessness.

The Arabs revolted anyway. In June 1916 the Hijaz rose, and the campaign was run out of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, Britain’s specialist office for the region. Prince Faisal, Hussein’s son, led the fighting force, with a young British officer named T. E. Lawrence riding alongside him.

Their main target was the Hijaz Railway, the Ottoman line carrying troops and supplies down the spine of Arabia. Arab raiding parties blew up track, bridges and trains along hundreds of kilometres of it, and tied down tens of thousands of Ottoman soldiers who would otherwise have been fighting the British somewhere else.

Arab men died doing that. In real numbers, in a real war, because Britain had promised them a country.

Promise two. In 1916, in total secrecy, Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and François Georges-Picot of France sat down and carved the same region up between themselves with coloured pencils. Britain takes this. France takes that. The Arabs were not told. The Arabs were not in the room. This was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and its lines are still on the map today.

Promise three is the one this whole story hangs on.

Sixty-seven words

Before we get to it, meet Herbert Samuel. A British politician, Jewish, and a committed Zionist, sitting inside the British cabinet. In 1915 he circulated a secret memorandum called The Future of Palestine. It argued that Britain should annex Palestine into the empire, encourage Jewish immigration, and let a Jewish majority build up there over the years.

Look at the phrase he reached for when he had to describe the people already living in the country. He wrote about that future Jewish majority growing up among the “muhammadans of Arab race”.

Not Palestinians. Not a people. Not a nation. A religious label bolted to a racial one, in a British cabinet paper, describing the overwhelming majority of a country.

He wrote that down in an official British document, and then Britain did exactly that, and then Britain sent him to Palestine to run it.

On 2 November 1917, the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, sent a short letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of Britain’s Jewish community. The main sentence is sixty-seven words long. It said that His Majesty’s Government viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and would use their best endeavours to help achieve it.

That is the Balfour Declaration. The Prime Minister whose cabinet approved it was David Lloyd George, and that is worth knowing, because the letter carries Balfour’s name the way a cheque carries a signature. The decision belonged to the government.

One country, promising a second country’s land, to a third group of people. Britain did not own Palestine. Britain had not yet even captured Palestine. The people who lived there were not asked, not warned, and not mentioned by name.

They do appear in the letter, though. Sort of.

The declaration adds that nothing should be done which might harm the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

Read that phrase again. Existing non-Jewish communities.

That was ninety percent of the population. Half a million people. Farmers, teachers, doctors, priests, imams, the whole living society of a country, and the official British description of them was a blank space defined by what they weren’t. No name. No nation. No political rights mentioned, only “civil and religious” ones.

Britain had no legal right to promise that land, and no moral right either.

Avi Shlaim, the Oxford historian, who is himself an Israeli, states it about as flatly as a historian can. Britain had no moral, political or legal right to promise land belonging to the Arabs to another people, which makes the declaration, in his words, “both immoral and illegal”.

Plenty of people said much the same at the time. It happened anyway.

One month later, at a celebration dinner in London, Rothschild, Samuel, Sykes and Weizmann stood together and toasted it.

The general walks in

On 11 December 1917, British troops under General Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem. Allenby got off his horse and walked in through the Jaffa Gate on foot.

He had thought about that carefully. Nineteen years earlier the German Kaiser had ridden into Jerusalem on horseback, through a gap knocked in the city wall specially for him, and it had looked exactly like what it was. Allenby wanted the opposite picture. The humble conqueror, on foot, respectful.

It worked. People still bring that photograph up.

Here is what was underneath it.

Al-Quds had been in Muslim hands since Umar ibn al-Khattab came to it in the year 637, and he came peacefully, by treaty, and gave the Christians of the city a written guarantee of their churches and their safety. The Crusaders took it in 1099 and killed their way through the streets. Salah ad-Din took it back in 1187 and did not. Apart from one short spell in the 1200s, the city stayed in Muslim care from that day until this December afternoon.

Around seven hundred and thirty years, ended by a man walking through a gate for the cameras.

And nobody in Britain was pretending this was a quiet change of administration. The newspapers and the cartoonists went straight for the Crusades. Armies out of Christian Europe had wanted this city for eight centuries and had never managed to keep it, and now a British general had it, and that is how it was sold at home. The Prime Minister called it a Christmas present for the British people.

A present. Somebody else’s city, with somebody else’s sanctuary in the middle of it.

Four hundred years of Ottoman rule ended that afternoon, and something a great deal older ended with it.

Marching with the British forces was a Jewish unit, and inside it were men whose names are going to come back in this story. David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who would become the hardest voice in the movement.

At that moment there were roughly 50,000 Jews in Palestine, about a tenth of the population, and around 600,000 Arabs.

The farmers in the villages heard that the First World War was over and a new government had arrived. Some of them were relieved. Because the final years of the war brought severe famine, heavy taxation, and forced conscription under Ottoman military.

They did not know about the letter.